Azio’s luxurious Retro Classic BT is a fusion of old and new

For day-to-day computing – your spreadsheets, your email chains, Googling stuff like “who holds the record for most grilled cheese sandwiches eaten in…” – you’re probably not too fussy about what keyboard you use. But when it comes to penning your memoirs – glasses right on the tip of your nose, the room presumably soaked with cigarette smoke – you need something with a bit of grandeur. Enter Azio’s Retro Classic. First introduced in 2017, it’s a backlit, mechanical QWERTY keyboard that looks and sounds like a vintage typewriter you might imagine in a steampunk novel. The ‘Artisan’ variant (pictured) features a Zinc alloy frame and genuine leather surface, but you can also opt for three similarly plush alternative designs. Old-school as the Retro Classic undoubtedly is, Azio knows it’ll be used by the cable-hating gadget fiends of 2018, so for $219.99 you can now get a Bluetooth version. Hemingway never had that.